Picture this: you just wrapped up your booth at your industry’s annual conference. Everything is sunshine and rainbows. There were zero last-minute snafus. Your swag was a huge draw and you had a steady stream of interested attendees. Now you have a shiny, massive (and opted-in) list of new prospects.

Now, you’ll use stage-based marketing to move your new prospects through a traditional lead journey. In other words, you’ll send a series of qualifying emails to warm up your prospects. The content of these emails moves in tandem with the prospect, from Stage 1 (Cold) to Stage 2 (Warm) to Stage 3 (Hot.) Once the prospects receive the hot content, a subset will identify themselves as marketing-qualified and you’ll send them over to sales. Then your sales colleagues will close those deals and everyone will bestow glory upon you and the marketing team. Right?

Well, not exactly.

Only 13% of new leads convert to an opportunity — and those leads take an average of 84 days to convert. You can’t afford to wait. Yet, you’ve sent your shiny list of prospects down an inefficient marketing funnel.

Stage-based marketing works wonders when you know the stage of the prospects:

Hot: Ready to buy and should talk to Sales

Warm: They know they have a problem your service would solve, and need to be nurtured on a frequent cadence to get them to be Hot.

Cold: Don’t know they have a problem that you would solve. They need to be educated about why they should consider spending money with anyone, let alone you.

But what about when you’re not sure? You absolutely met people at your booth who were already hot (or warm); you just weren’t aware of their stage. But you treated them as cold out of the gate. At best, you wasted time by sending them content irrelevant to their stage. At worst, you’ve lost their interest forever.

There’s a better way to identify your sales-ready leads. Flip your strategy. Go from 1-2-3 to 3-2-1. Send your hot qualifying email first, then your warm email (to those that didn’t act on the hot content) and then your cold email (to those that didn’t act on the warm content.)

Instead of Cold → Warm → Hot, take the bull by the horns and go from Hot → Warm → Cold.

Why does this work? Simple. You ensure that you’re not late to the party for those of your prospects who are already hot. Then, the people that aren’t quite ready will self-identify by not acting.
Pardot’s new Engagement Studio makes executing this strategy easier than ever. You can add nodes to do the heavy lifting for you and even put it all together in a single Engagement program.

Here’s a simple example of how this might play out in Engagement Studio:

Here’s a quick overview of what happened in the above:

Send the first email “3 – Hard Hitting CTA”, targeted to Hot Leads
This email would focus on them buying your product, perhaps offering a time to connect with a sales rep.

Wait a short period (i.e. 7 Days)

Send a followup email “2 – Medium CTA”, targeted to Warm Leads
This email would be targeted at them reading some thought leadership on your service (say, the importance of your value proposition)

Wait a slightly longer period (10 Days)

Send a followup email “1 – Soft CTA”, targeted to Cold Leads

This email be more generally targeted, helping potential leads understand that they have a problem that you solve

If they reach the bottom without ever clicking a link, you know they are very cold and not worth your time.

By stepping outside the box and using the 3-2-1 strategy, you will quickly identify your sales-ready prospects, without sacrificing the ability to nurture your warm and cold prospects. This quick identification will help you rapidly convert more MQLs and increase the opportunities that your marketing team is responsible for.

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/rapidly-convert-prospects-3-2-1-strategy/feed/03 Content Creation Tips B2B Marketers Can Borrow From Journalistshttp://www.pardot.com/blog/3-content-creation-tips-b2b-marketers-can-borrow-journalists/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/3-content-creation-tips-b2b-marketers-can-borrow-journalists/#respondWed, 07 Dec 2016 21:22:53 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47599Journalism and marketing are more similar than you might think. In both industries, keeping up with the speed of change is the real challenge. From the way that technology has transformed the landscape to shifting buyer attitudes and perceptions, both Journalists and B2B Marketers face the constant battle of creating engaging content. These are a few tips for creating content that came in handy in my journalism days – and they’re just as handy now.

1. Look For Ways to Create Timely Content

Timeliness isn’t just for the news industry. B2B Marketers can also take advantage of recent events – fads, memes, pop culture phenomenons and viral videos – to give their content creativity a boost. You don’t have to break the news, but being able to comment on recent trends – especially where new technologies and industry concepts are concerned – lends relevance and credibility to your brand.

Keep a look out for things that would appeal to your target audience, particularly anything industry specific that’s made it mainstream for a moment (some of the greatest ‘mainstream’ ideas started as niche industry concepts – Segway anyone?) Your social media platforms are a great place to look for timely inspirations, as those are conversations happening in real-time. If you come across something – act on it! Just like in the newsroom, there is such a thing as being *too *late to the party.

2. Get Your Sources Involved

Whether it’s an industry or thought leader, or a successful business owner, having sources like these can really bolster your content strategy and give it an additional layer of star power. There’s a reason that the biggest names in your industry are the biggest. Case studies are great, but if you want to infuse more creativity into your content, try hosting panels or round tables, and having your best sources contribute content of their own.

If you want to find some good ‘sources’ to include in your campaigns, you can look for the leading speakers at events, as well as corporate industry leaders and advisors. You can also pick someone you know – maybe they’ve run an amazing program at your company, or they’ve crushed their target goals in a really creative or unusual way. Get them to tell their story gives your content a new perspective, and some great inspiration.

3. Go for Evangelists

Journalists love when their readers interact with their work. Cultivating a devoted fanbase is par for the course when you’re working to establish yourself in the newsroom, and it’s just as important in B2B Marketing. Our ‘fans’ are our current clients, and their stories of success are the most persuasive tool we have when it comes to drawing prospects into the sales funnel.

User groups, forums and social media groups create a sense of community among your clients. Marketers don’t always have to start or participate in these either – they might exist already, formed by users for users. Every group needs members, so promoting them and creating unique content targeted to their most pressing questions, comments or issues can help build a mutually beneficial relationship.

ABM has been getting some serious attention lately, and I can see why. It sounds great up front: target your marketing to whole accounts, drive revenue. But upon closer inspection, ABM is not quite as straight forward as that. Account based marketing is a strategy that laser focuses your marketing efforts on your most important accounts instead of individual clients and prospects. It’s far from a labor saving approach. With your most important accounts on the line, your campaigns need to be even more personalized, and more customized to really connect with your target audience. So is it worth it? The answer to that depends on the type of business and industry you’re in, but if you’re like me this list will help you take a closer look at the pros and cons of ABM. For more information on ABM, join Pardot on December 13 for ‘Beyond the Hype: Making Account-Based Marketing Work for You,’ featuring guest speaker Lori Wizdo, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

Pro: ABM will up your personalization game.

This is a pro in the age of customer-centric marketing, but be careful – ABM doesn’t take personalization lightly. With account based marketing, your campaigns will need to speak to a whole account so it can’t sound mass-produced. This is a delicate job meant to carefully cultivate relationships and brand awareness on a 1:1 level – at scale. Sound like enough of a challenge? Just wait. The approach requires an almost extreme level of focus on the unique pain-points, issues, and market of each of your target accounts. You’ll need to make sure your sales and marketing teams are tightly aligned in order to deliver a truly seamless customer experience.

Con: You need to multiply the amount of content you’ll need by the number of accounts you target.

Remember how I mentioned that ABM is labor intensive? For each of the accounts you target with this strategy, you’ll need to identify the right messaging, the right cadence, and then create the right content to sustain a campaign. If you have a strong content team with enough resource and the right tool set (hint: marketing automation really, really comes in handy for this part), then it’s doable. Again, a closely aligned marketing and sales team will be essential because how and when your sales team distributes your content will need to be tuned to each of your disparate campaigns.

Pro: ABM can help you zero in on important accounts

If done correctly, ABM can give your most important accounts some genuine TLC. You’ll get to know them well from a marketing perspective, and you’ll be able to create the kind of campaigns and content that offer real value. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s worth it if you have just a few top accounts that make up the bulk of your target audience. Particularly where cultivating relationships with current customers is concerned, this can be a big help in creating customer evangelists and true fans of your brand.

Con: An ABM strategy works best with just a few important accounts

ABM is not a strategy that you can expand to include every account you have – unless of course, you only have a handful. With the necessary level of detail, it becomes too easily unwieldy and almost impossible to leverage across the hundreds or even thousands of accounts that most businesses will have. In that sense, it’s not a strategy that is meant for every business or every industry. The good news is that the general elements of ABM are the same as the general elements of any other customer-focused marketing strategy: personalization, customization, and a streamlined, buyer-directed buying cycle. These can be much more easily integrated into a marketing strategy that’s a better fit for you business.

Pro: You don’t need any special tools for ABM – except two.

If you’re planning to implement an Account Based Marketing strategy, there are just two tools you’ll want to have to ease some of the labor intensity and make it easier to manage: marketing automation and data analytics software. Truthfully, you’ll want to have both anyway for any kind of customer-centric marketing, but when it comes to ABM, these tools are a must. A marketing automation platform provides a way to easily create, manage and most importantly – track – campaigns for each of your top accounts. Built in scoring and grading features become paramount because you’ll need to make sure that you’re focusing on the warmest leads at each stage to help your sales team close deals at that scale. You’ll also need to be carefully tracking engagement metrics, and that’s where data analytics software comes in. Engagement becomes much more important when targeting an entire account, and getting regular data on how well your campaigns are performing withe each of your target accounts is the best way to make sure that you’re able to deliver the right information at the right time.

ABM – like any other marketing strategy, isn’t going to work for everyone. Creating your own list of pros and cons will help you identify the ways in which ABM may – or may not – fit into your overall marketing strategy. Making sure you’re closely aligned with your sales team and your c-suite will help you set goals for your overall marketing efforts and make sure that as your strategies evolve, you’re able to meet the needs of your clients and prospects. Still not sure if ABM is right for you? Reserve your seat for ‘Beyond the Hype: Making Account-Based Marketing Work for You‘ and hear from guest speaker Lori Wizdo for Forrester Research.

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/pros-cons-account-based-marketing/feed/0Using Peer Research and Survey Data to Drive Lead Generationhttp://www.pardot.com/blog/using-peer-research-survey-data-drive-lead-generation/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/using-peer-research-survey-data-drive-lead-generation/#respondMon, 05 Dec 2016 16:00:04 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47546Peer research is a much overlooked resource for B2B marketers, but it’s actually one of the most helpful methods of teasing out buyers pain points. For example, on average, prospects receive over 3 invitations per day to attend webinars, download case studies or read the latest white paper. How do you cut through all that noise? Over 70% of B2B marketers self-report that they don’t have a great answer. How’d we know that? We asked them! That’s the beauty of survey based lead generation. Polling your prospects to learn more about them fuels both immediate lead flow and hyper relevant content. You might have read our last blog, Enabling Continuous Customer Engagement, where we discussed that today’s marketer’s opportunity is to create an ongoing dialogue with their prospects and customers. That’s great, but how do you create content that is engaging and targeted enough to fuel this dialogue?

Survey Based Lead Generation

Brands like DiscoverOrg leverage Survey Based Lead Generation programs to:

Overcome the hardest part of the sales process: making initial contact

Open doors and begin the dialogue with their prospects

Develop a “needs profile” for their target accounts.

Create a foundation for tailoring their pitch and outbound messaging.

The results are immediate:

Survey respondents are, by definition, qualified leads as they were handpicked to participate and provide the information that you wanted to capture. And what’s even more interesting is that peer based research drives a 36% higher engagement rate vs “traditional” content. Why? Consider your personal interest level in reading a whitepaper or attending a webinar that features insights from people just like you. It’s much harder to resist learning more about your industry, role and related opportunities from fellow business owners who know your difficulties and form a benchmark for your success. And once you’ve created the survey, the resulting data is owned by you. You now have a unique perspective on the industry to share with your prospects and customers. Consider all of the campaign possibilities: social teasers, webinars, infographics, eBooks and in-person thought leadership spots. When it comes to sharing and promoting your content, survey data gives you another edge: industry influencers crave original source content and perspectives to share with their followers, and guess what, your survey data is just what they are looking for.

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/using-peer-research-survey-data-drive-lead-generation/feed/03 Reasons Lead Nurturing is for Everyonehttp://www.pardot.com/blog/3-reasons-lead-nurturing-everyone/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/3-reasons-lead-nurturing-everyone/#commentsFri, 02 Dec 2016 19:43:46 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47538Ah, lead nurturing. We meet again. There’s no shortage of good reasons to make it a core part of your marketing strategy: you’ll build better relationships with customers, you’ll have another chance to recapture cold or dead leads, you’ll stay top of mind and ensure that you’re in front of your prospects when they’re getting ready to make a purchasing decision.

No matter the unique challenges of your industry, lead nurturing is on B2B marketing strategy that’s universal. Here are three reasons lead nurturing can – and will work for you. If you’re in the life sciences industry – or curious about how to develop a consistent lead nurturing strategy for that industry, join David Chapin, CEO of Forma Life Science Marketing and author of the book: Making the Complex Compelling — Creating High Performance Marketing in the Life Sciences for his webinar presentation ‘The Secrets to Effective Lead Nurturing in Life Sciences‘ on December 7.

It frees up your sales team

Nurturing your leads is actually going to save time and resource for your sales team – and here’s how: lead nurturing should fall to your marketing team. With their insight into campaigns and content, your marketing team is best placed to create the overall nurturing strategy and set up individual nurturing programs that will apply to different types of leads. Marketing and sales should sit down (preferably in the same room) and go through what a qualified lead looks like, and what types of nurturing campaigns those leads will need as they go through the buying cycle – whether it’s top of mind nurture programs for long deal cycles, or re-engagement campaigns for cold leads. From there, your marketing team can build the necessary campaigns and populate them with content. That means that all your sales team has to do is ensure that they assign any leads who’s status changes to the appropriate campaign – and you’re done! The cycle becomes self-sustaining the longer it runs, so if your marketing team builds out the types of campaigns you’ll need early on, and works together with your sales team to ensure that leads are quickly and efficiently identified and moved into the right nurturing programs, you’ll only have to adjust to the needs of your buyers.

Marketing automation makes it easy

Nurturing sounds like it takes a lot of effort – the regular cadence and constant assessment to make sure that prospects who engage are getting moved further down the sales funnel while those who don’t are warmed up again seems like it would take more resources than not – but honestly, the reverse is true. If you’ve got a marketing automation platform, lead nurturing becomes easy.

The proof is in the pudding: marketing automation can automate the tedious process of tracking individual leads as they go through each nurture and the manual hand-off between marketing and sales for qualified leads. Using the lead scoring and grading features, you can assign your leads a score based on their activities and engagement with your emails, website and content. This makes it much easier to spot warm leads at-a-glance that can then be passed straight on to sales.

It maximizes the value of your leads

Lead Nurturing is the best way to ensure that you’re getting the most out of each lead. Whether you have a thousand leads or just a few per month, you don’t want to let any go to waste. Lead nurturing allows you to match the pace of your prospects as they move through the buying cycle. It keeps your brand in front of your prospects so that you won’t lose opportunities to re-engage cooler leads, or tip the balance in your favor in competitive deals.

Your company blog is one of the best top-of-funnel marketing assets you have. At my last startup, our company blog was responsible for 40% of our website’s traffic and became the cornerstone of our thought-leadership and content marketing engine. We produced 2-3 posts per week, built a network of trustworthy contributors, wrote awesome guest posts – and we did so 100% blind. Not once did we stop to chisel out the metrics that could validate our work or provide low-hanging fruit where improvement was concerned, and it appears we were not alone. I have been asking fellow marketers about their company blogging habits and learned that most marketers do not have insight into their company blog, but why?

What makes analyzing blog metrics so difficult?

Over 92% of companies with an active blog have built their blog inside their company website much like Pardot does, and while that set up works well, it can make analyzing the blog separately from the overall website very challenging. In my experience this is the single biggest reason that marketers don’t have a clear picture of their blog’s analytics, the data is simply hard to get. The good news is that if you have Google Analytics installed on your website, the data is there – it just needs to be accessed. More on this in a bit.

What metrics should you be tracking when it comes to your blog?

Overall Unique Visitors and Pageviews
This is overall traffic to your blog. Analyzing this number on a monthly basis will give insight into your audience size, growth, and seasonal trends that might affect your blog readership. Knowing these trends will help you plan your content and is a great prompt to add additional calls-to-action that can take advantage of increased traffic during peak months. For lesser trafficked months this is a signal to plan more engaging content to overcome the natural down-traffic trend. Another important take-away is the ability to visualize what % of your website traffic is coming from the blog. Remember, blog posts have amazing long-tail SEO benefits over time and you should be able to report how much traffic the blog brings in. We found the blog was responsible for 40% of our overall web traffic!

Visitors and Pageviews to Your Homepage
Why is the homepage special? While most blog traffic is going to land on your individual blog post pages via organic search. I consider visitors that enter our blog via the homepage more important. These visitors are more likely to consider the blog a “destination” and very often are return visitors that have come to rely on us for high quality content. Paying attention to this metric will tell you if there is opportunity for optimization.

Pages Per Session, Bounce Rate, and Avg. Visit Duration
Engagement is one of the most important areas to monitor. These three metrics are always a work-in-progress and can be impacted by making small improvements to your blog.

Pages Per Session: A great blog will have a metric above 3, an average blog 1.5. Where do you fall?

Bounce Rate: A bounce rate at or around 50% for a blog is considered quite good. Web traffic comes from so many random sources that it is difficult to push this rate much lower. Achieving the 50-60% range is a great accomplishment.

Avg. Visit Duration: We started at 1:50 and I asked the team to shoot for 3 minutes. With the ever-shortening attention span of visitors an average of 3-3.5 minutes is quite good. If your blog visitor duration is over 5 minutes please comment and share how you maintain engagement. If your engagement numbers are lower than you would like don’t worry this can be improved with a few technical upgrades and/or a plugin. At my last company our bounce rate started at 88% but after adding a “recommended for you” widget at the bottom of our posts the number dropped to 70% in 1 month. Readers were coming to our site, reading the post they landed on, and not finding their way to 100’s of other posts -simply criminal! If you use WordPress, I’d recommend looking for a “related posts” plugin or a plugin that offers the even more modern “infinite scrolling” posts model that Venture Beat uses.

If you have found a great WordPress plugin to keep visitors engaged please share your favorite in the comments below!

Count of Email Subscribers
An amazing statistic I found researching company blogs is that over 40% of companies with an active blog using Pardot do not give blog visitors the option to receive content via email subscription. Almost as shocking is that 20% of the companies that do offer a subscription do so using Feedburner – a Google owned but “left-for-dead” tool built in 2002. As a Pardot user I would recommend creating a blog subscriber list and tracking the total numbers over time. If you’re looking for a 3rd party plugin to automate sending blog subscriber emails give FeedOtter a try.

Finding your blog’s data

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that your blog data was in your website’s Google Analytics account. The key to exposing this requires creating a custom segment for your blog users. Once you’ve done this you will be able to view and report on just the blog portion of your site.

What other blog metrics do you track on a regular basis? Have a great blog dashboard to share? Please let me know via comments below!

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/track-key-blog-metrics/feed/0Three Things Marketers on Smaller Teams Need to Help Grow Their Businesshttp://www.pardot.com/blog/three-things-marketers-smaller-teams-need-help-grow-business/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/three-things-marketers-smaller-teams-need-help-grow-business/#respondMon, 28 Nov 2016 15:18:15 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47481In my very first marketing role, I worked for a company of just seven people. I always think back on this particular position as one of the best (and most difficult) I’ve ever had. I learned a lot – and fast. On a marketing team of just four, I got to wear hats as diverse as copywriter, editor, admin and and storyboard artist. As a recent graduate, I wasn’t even aware of how much I was learning every day – instead there was just an overwhelming sense of having to get from one task to another in record time. To this day, I work fast when I’m busy.

Marketers on growing marketing teams face some interesting challenges. There was no shortage of good ideas, but figuring out how to execute on them with the resources we had was no mean feat. Between managing eNewsletters and email campaigns and keeping up with all the admin and content creation, we were swamped. We exported, outsourced, and scaled down, but it was always a juggling act, and the name of the game was growth.

While there were a lot of things we needed, these are three of the most important things that smaller marketing teams can use to ramp up their marketing efforts and make that juggling act a little easier.

1. Good Customer Relationships

As the business expands, small but mighty marketing teams are central to developing the brand and building relationships with prospects and clients. Those relationships are one of the most important resources we have, so making sure that prospects had a streamlined, customized and personalized first experience with our brand was focus #1 for us. Focus #2 was ensuring that once our prospects had become clients we were still cultivating those relationships.

It starts with building a brand that can go the distance. When you’re growing, these early interactions with customers are super important. You might not be new to the market, but you’re bound to be trying new things, so keeping your focus firmly on your customer, their needs, and their pain points, and creating strong branding and messaging that offers customers a clear understanding of who you are and what you do is going to help a lot in the long run.

2. The Right Tools

Back then, we struggled to balance the needs of both customers and clients because we didn’t have tools like marketing automation or even a strong data analytics platform to bolster our efforts. When I think of what we could’ve done with those tools in place, I wish I could go back in time and set them up. Building and maintaining those key relationships would’ve been a breeze!

Seriously, don’t underestimate how much the right tools can help a smaller team. No matter what, marketers wear many hats – but tools like marketing automation make the eternal process of getting things done a lot easier. Instead of agonizing for days over how to identify and then pass the warmest leads from your newest email campaign to your newest – and only – sales rep, you can open up a dashboard, and simply see it all laid out with scores and grades. Even now, I could cry thinking about how much time that would’ve saved us. Then forget having to print off a list of contacts – try automated alerts that let your sales rep know as soon as you’ve passed him a lead. I think our sales rep would’ve cried too.

3. The Ability to Try New Things

This is probably the number one thing that any marketing – whether 1 or 100 should have in their arsenal. It’s not just about being agile when you’re trying to grow a business, although agility is bound to help – it’s about being able to take risks, smaller ones, and sometimes bigger ones – with your overall marketing strategy. When something doesn’t work, you need to be able to scrap it and find something better. Great new ideas are great – but looking critically at the processes you have in place, whether it’s your alignment with your sales team, or the way you qualify your leads, or making sure that you and your C-Suite share the same goals for your marketing programs is going to be the best way to keep inefficient processes from becoming too big and complicated to fix.

There are a bunch of things – more time, a bigger budget, matching t-shirts – that could’ve helped us back then, and there will always be more things that marketing teams would secretly like to do no matter what size they are, but when it comes to growth, smaller teams have some amazing potential. With the right tools, and a strong customer focus, you can put processes in place that will continue your success and increase your customer’s satisfaction no matter what size your team ends up being eventually, and that will affect not just your marketing strategy, but your whole business.

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/three-things-marketers-smaller-teams-need-help-grow-business/feed/0How to Win at Lead Nurturinghttp://www.pardot.com/blog/win-lead-nurturing/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/win-lead-nurturing/#commentsTue, 22 Nov 2016 15:40:45 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47455Did you know that roughly 73% of new leads never convert into a sale (Marketing Sherpa)? The number is staggering, yet only about 35% of marketers are doing anything about it.

If you want to tap into that 73% of undecided or unsure buyers, you should be nurturing those leads. Chances are, this isn’t the first time you’re hearing that, but getting your nurturing right can be a little tricky. If you’re having trouble getting the right balance for your lead nurturing efforts, you can use these dos and don’ts to get on the right track.

DO Segment Your Leads

The exact breakdown depends on the products or services that you provide, as well as the demographics of your target audience, but some common segmentations can include geographic location, job title, and company size. Personalization is key here, so the more targeted your lists the more likely you are to hit the right note with your customers. To better personalize your nurtures, you can include more detailed segmentations like past purchases and specific activity on your website.

DO Follow-Up Immediately

Luckily, marketers are also customers, so if you’re ever in doubt about how to reach your buyers, it’s not hard to put yourself in their shoes. If you’re looking for a new product or service and you’re interested in learning more about it, you probably want that information right away, not the next business day. That’s what your clients are feeling too, which is why triggered information, such as an automatic responder, does 67% better than a delayed check in (Epsilon).

DO More Touch Points

The key idea behind nurturing is relationship building; you are trying to genuinely understand your clients’ needs, provide value and then, hopefully offer a solution. All of this is not going to get done with just one email! Having a few touchpoints along the way will help you establish trust, solidify thought leadership and yes, eventually also make the sell. Research shows that 5 is the magic number when it comes to touch points — it gives you the chance to introduce yourself, set expectations, drop some knowledge bombs, share a useful tool and close the deal!

DON’T Be a One-Trick Marketer

A successful nurturing program hinges on content. That means that sending variations of the same email five times isn’t nurturing, it’s spamming. Before hitting send, think through a logical sequence and then create relevant, varied content that will move your prospect along a defined path. For example, think of a “welcome series” for a new prospect, or theme a nurturing campaign around an idea such as: “we know you have a problem, we have the solution!” for an existing client. Vary the types and topics of the content you send, and always aim to provide value with what goes out.

DON’T Forget to Align

Since your end goal is to gain a long-term customer, your sales and marketing teams should be working together to develop a nurturing plan. Preparedness is the secret sauce of nurturing; sales can help marketing understand what kind of content would be appropriate, while marketing can give sales the background and analytics for a killer call. With marketing/sales alignment, your nurturing will be much stronger.

DON’T Jump the Gun

How do you know when your lead is ready for a call? To win at nurturing, having a built-in qualifier that will let you know goes a long way. If you’re not using lead scoring, consider this your chance to take nurturing to the next level. Calling too early or too late will result in a missed opportunity, but with a lead scoring system you get an automatic heads-up that signals that your nurture mission is complete at the perfect moment!

When a lead is nurtured, their chance of converting increases by 20%; nurturing is a powerful yet under-utilized tool. What’s more, nurturing isn’t only for leads! One-time clients can be kept in the loop for new products, frequent buyers can get some well-deserved love, and former clients can be brought back into the fold. Once you get this nurturing thing down, there is no limit to how you can engage your audience!

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/win-lead-nurturing/feed/1Lightning Enhancements for Pardot and Salesforce Engagehttp://www.pardot.com/blog/lightning-enhancements-pardot-salesforce-engage/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/lightning-enhancements-pardot-salesforce-engage/#commentsMon, 21 Nov 2016 21:46:15 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47444We’re excited to highlight several enhancements to Salesforce features in Lightning: an Engagement History lightning component, support for Salesforce Engage in Lightning, and editable template regions in Engage Campaigns. These features better enable sales reps to understand their prospects’ interactions, act fast and effectively, and send the right message at the right time.

ENGAGEMENT HISTORY LIGHTNING COMPONENT

The Engagement History lightning component is a rebranded and updated way to view Pardot and Engage prospect activities within Salesforce. If your organization is currently using the Pardot Activities VisualForce page to view prospect activities on leads and contacts in Salesforce and making the transition to Lightning, we recommend replacing the VisualForce page with the Engagement History lightning component.

We’ve made updates to the naming and grouping of activities to simplify the user experience for end users. Now sales reps are able to drill into and understand their prospects’ interactions in a way they have never been able to before, allowing them to have more relevant conversations with prospects. Because the lightning component is supported on Lightning App Builder, engagement history can be surfaced in any apps that allow adding custom lightning components. So, reps can always have this information at their fingertips at all times. For more information check out our Knowledge Base article.

SALESFORCE ENGAGE IN LIGHTNING

As part of our Salesforce Engage offering, reps can send tracked one-to-one and one-to-many emails from list views using marketing approved templates, get personalized email reporting, add leads and contacts to nurture programs, and get real-time alerts when prospects engage within Sales Cloud. Reps can enhance the power of this functionality even further now in Lightning.

We’re excited to announce an updated look and feel for Engage Campaigns and reports. In addition, reps can more easily select and swap templates, compose emails without templates, and edit and send emails, allowing them to be more productive. We’re also excited to highlight the addition of custom date ranges in Engage Reports so reps can analyze data across the duration of the sales cycle.

EDITABLE TEMPLATE REGIONS IN ENGAGE CAMPAIGNS
Finally, as part of these updates, we’re introducing a highly requested feature by users: editable regions in Engage Campaigns! Marketers now have the ability to designate which regions within templates can be edited by the sales user and lock regions they do not want edited. This allows reps to have access to marketing approved content, but ensures that branding standards, messaging, and legal disclaimers remain in tact. For more information, check out our Knowledge Base article on template regions.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on these new enhancements, and as always, you can continue to share your feedback on our Idea Exchange here.

]]>http://www.pardot.com/blog/lightning-enhancements-pardot-salesforce-engage/feed/4Holiday Productivity: 4 Tips for Getting Things Done During the Holiday Seasonhttp://www.pardot.com/blog/holiday-productivity-4-tips-getting-things-done-holiday-season/
http://www.pardot.com/blog/holiday-productivity-4-tips-getting-things-done-holiday-season/#respondMon, 21 Nov 2016 18:50:54 +0000http://www.pardot.com/?p=47434It’s that time of year again: the not-quite-the-holidays holiday period. This week, productivity has the potential spiral downwards to an all time low as we focus on packing, travel plans, and who’s going to have to carve the turkey (hint: it’s not me). So how do we beat the odds and get stuff done – without having to tape our hands to the keyboard?

Try these four tips to help you stay productive before you start your holidays:

1. Focus on one thing at a time

If you have a mountain of stuff to do before you get to jet set off for the holidays, it can literally feel like scaling a mountain.

Kinda like this.

So instead of focusing on all the things that are getting in the way of you and binge watching your favorite show, break down your to-do list into manageable pieces and work through each one at a time.

2. Stay in the present

Which brings me to my next tip. As you work through your list, focus on today – right now, this hour. Thinking ahead to how good dinner will be, or how much fun you’re going to have later this week is only going to make it easier to space out.

We’ve all been there…

By concentrating on right now, it’s mind over matter – you’ll find that time flies because your putting all of your attention on what you’re doing.

3. Do the most important things first

Prioritizing will make sure that you get the non-negotiable projects done in good time to have a good time during your holidays. Rank your projects by importance and work on the biggest, most important, or most time-consuming first to be sure that critical things are done and dusted by the time you’re ready to head out.

Aaand… Done!

Setting deadlines will also help with prioritizing. Not every item on your to-do list will have one, but setting your own – and then trying to keep them – will help you avoid procrastinating.

4. Take regular five minute breaks

Believe it or not, taking breaks for a few minutes when you’re working on a lot can help you collect your thoughts and come back to what you were doing feeling refreshed. Try taking a short walk, grabbing some coffee or tea, or stretching at your desk.

We’re good to go!

Have you got any tips or tricks for staying productive that work for you?